The Island of Excess Love (14 page)

“Ready?” Hex and Venice carry me, with Argos following. Ez and Ash moor the boat on the rocks and come behind us.

The girl doesn't flinch as we approach her. The air is cold and gray and I can taste salt in it. I'm shivering so hard I feel it reverberating in Hex's body.

“We aren't going to hurt you,” Venice says. “We need to help my sister.”

The girl stands, still wrapped in her thick hair. She and Venice lock eyes as if no one else is here.

“Are you all right?” Venice asks.

She doesn't answer. She just starts to sing in a low, keening whisper.

“Can you help us find water and shelter? Maybe food?” Ez asks. “Please. She's losing blood.”

When he says the word “water” I realize that my throat is parched and my tongue swollen as if I haven't had a drink for days. Maybe I haven't.

The girl releases her hair so it whips out around her, revealing a frail frame dressed in rags and skin the color of nutmeg.

*   *   *

The earth is shaking when the mother, still wearing her pink scrubs from work, runs to pull her two daughters from their beds and into the kitchen. She tells them to get into the position they've learned at school. Duck and cover. Under the biggest table. Furniture slides across the room and the three of them cling to each other as pictures fall from the walls and glass shatters.

The older one has started to wail first and the little one who always imitates her has joined in, somewhat hollowly, as if she really doesn't understand why she's crying. The woman has to shout to be heard over their cries and the sound of their house combusting around them.

“I love you, my babies,” the woman says. “Acacia. Little Lily. You are deep in my heart and I'm in yours. No matter what happens we will never really be apart.”

When the older girl comes to, the shaking has stopped. Her house has ceased to exist. The table they hid under is gone. The ceiling is a merciless sky.

Her mother and sister are bleeding. Their eyes are closed. They lie motionless. She places her hands on her mother's head, her always carefully styled black hair. The girl's skin is paler than her mother's and she wishes it weren't. She wishes she at least had that reminder sealing her own body forever.

The blood keeps rivering out while the daughter closes her eyes and focuses every cell of her being on the task of making it stop. Her mother used to say, “Acacia, girl, you have the touch. Someday you're going to be a doctor, I bet. You can make my headaches go away just by putting your little hands on me, baby.”

This is not a headache.

The blood stops. But it's too late. Her mother and sister are dead.

The girl rises to her feet and looks around. The water is everywhere. It looks like a sea monster.
Leviathan
is the word her mother taught her. As the wave comes toward her she clutches a piece of furniture, hauling herself up onto it this time. It's the kitchen table, the one she and her mother and sister hid under as they'd been taught to in the earthquake drills. It hadn't protected them at all.

All lies, the way even her mother's words were lies:
We will never really be apart.

The girl clings to the table that betrayed them as it takes her out to sea.

*   *   *

I return from my unwelcome vision. More devastation. Always. Everywhere. We must help this girl.

But right now I can't even walk and she is running up and over the rocks. At the highest point she turns and looks right at Venice, gesturing for him to follow her.

Hex and Venice carry me over the rocks after the girl. A wind smelling of my wounds makes me shiver and I press myself against Hex.

He should drop you down from here and let you die.

*   *   *

I wake up on the ground, next to a burning campfire in the shelter of some rocks. My head is in Ez's lap, Argos is lying somewhere both on and between my feet as he somehow manages to do, and I can hear Ash singing a lullaby. Venice is cross-legged beside me at the entrance to a small cave.

I try to sit up but pain stabs through me. Someone has bandaged my shoulder and probably cleaned it but the wound feels hot, teeming with bacteria.

“She's awake,” Ez says to the others.

Venice turns toward me and Ash comes over but I don't see Hex anywhere.

Ez helps lift my head and offers me water from a small bowl. I gulp at it, spilling some down my chin.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Some island. I don't know exactly.”

“What happened?”

“That girl ran off and we followed her.”

“Is she okay?” I say. I feel compelled to find this girl, to help her in some way. Venice's eyes tell me he's having the same thought.

“She disappeared so we found water and some berries and made camp.” Ez holds up a handful of crushed red berries and I let him feed me, trying to be more careful than with the water. They taste bitter but I don't care. I gulp more water; it seems I'll never get enough.

“What happened before, on the king's island?” The words hurt to pronounce but the silent question in my mind is worse.

“There must have been some kind of spell that was broken when he … when he died,” Venice says. “The whole island was some kind of enchantment.”

He died.

The king died. Burned to death.

Burnt offering.

It was all an enchantment. The harpies were poisoned, decimated girls dressed in rotting feathers; the king transformed them to appear as beautiful winged girls. Why would they have killed him? They said something about me making them do it. Why?

Because you slept with him! Because they wanted him and he betrayed them. Because you betrayed your lover.

“Hex!” I say. “Where's Hex?”

There's silence filled only with the cold salt wind. Then a voice says, “Right here, Queen Penelope.”

I still can't see him, but, “I need to talk to you,” I say. “In private.”

Ez makes clucking sounds, trying to discourage me.
Too weak. Need rest. Not yet. It can wait.

He must have guessed already. And if he knows, then Hex knows.
Queen Penelope. He knows.
Did I say something before? Why did I speak?

But I have to tell him the truth now that I'm more lucid; it has to come from me.

“Please let us talk alone,” I say, coughing. There's a cloud of tobacco on the air. Maybe I'm imagining …

Ez makes a pillow out of leaves and eases me down onto it. He and Ash walk away. I notice that they're not touching each other the way they usually do. Venice follows them, looking back at me with his gray eyes, a worried half smile, which means he's afraid. Only Argos stays.

Hex squats down beside me but he doesn't touch me. He's smoking a cigarette and I wonder where he got it. The cigarette is gripped between his fore and middle fingers and he brings it to his lips and rolls his eyes upward as he inhales, not bothering to direct the smoke away from me, even when I cough again.

“Where'd you get that?” I say.

He takes another drag and blows the smoke directly at me this time. “Don't be a hater.”

“I just wondered.”

“Score, huh? Found them in the cave.”

“Are you okay?” I ask him.

“Of course I'm fine,” he clips without looking me in the eye. “What's up?”

“I'm sorry I drank the wine. I know that's hard for you.”

He smiles and the coldness of it makes me shiver. “Actually, that's not really an issue. Knock yourself out and party.” Nodding around us at the dark landscape. “We better live it up while we can, homegirl.”

I gulp and take a breath. The pain in my shoulder almost helps; it's like the punishment I deserve. “I need to tell you something. The reason the king was killed. You left me. I thought you were gone.”

“Yeah, I wanted to find a way to get us out of there safely?” He says it like a question. “I built a little boat? That's what I was doing with my time while you all went swimming and shit. Or whatever you were doing. So when you got rammed by that spear I had a way to get you the hell out of there.”

“But you could have told me.”

“Actually, Pen? No. I couldn't. You were drunk, which, you know, is completely fine with me, and high as fuck on King Bucky Horny whatever-his-name-is.” Hex pushes up his sweatshirt sleeve and examines the tattoo that reads
Faithless
. “Virgil mentions the Agathyrsi people? They were known for their tattoos, dyeing their hair indigo blue, wearing lots of gold, and taking
multiple wives
.”

Hex knows everything. How does he know? Did he guess? Did I tell him?

As usual, he can read my thoughts.

“‘Rumour, the swiftest traveller of all the ills on earth

Thriving on movement, gathering strength as it goes, at the start

A small and cowardly thing, it soon puffs itself up

And walking upon the ground, buries its head in the cloud-base.

… A swift-footed creature, a winged angel of ruin,

A terrible, grotesque monster, each feather upon whose body—

Incredible though it sounds—has a sleepless eye beneath it,

And for every eye she has also a tongue, a voice and a pricked ear.'”

It's the passage from
The Aeneid
where the secret liaison between Aeneas and Queen Dido is revealed. “Stop speaking in Virgil. Please, Hex.”

“‘But who can ever hoodwink a woman in love? The queen

Apprehensive even when things went well, now sensed his deception.'”

“Hex!” In this passage, Queen Dido realizes that Aeneas is leaving her but I know that's not what Hex means by quoting this; he means that I have deceived him and he's right.

“Speaking in Virgil? Wouldn't that be Virgilese, technically? Virgilesque? Virgellian? You like to make up words, remember?” He's returned from his epic reverie and his eyes move over all of me like punishing fingers. “Ez and Ash told me what the harpy things said. About blaming you for them killing him. And I figured the only thing that would have made them kill their precious king was…”

“I'm sorry, Hex. I didn't know what I was doing. Please…” My pulse is spreading the pain faster through my body.
Good.

“Yeah, good times, man. My girlfriend forever partook of bold debauchery, or, in layman's terms, fucked around on me.”

“I'm sorry, Hex, I'm so sorry.”

“GFN. Girlfriend Never. Girlfriend No More. I like the sound of it.”

“Forgive me, please. I don't know how…” I reach my hand out to him but he makes a face like he's smelled something rotten—the harpies without their enchantment—and moves farther away.

“I think you do. Basically, it's Copulation 101. You get naked with the antler dude and you spread your legs. Actually the antlers aren't basic. That's a little kinky.”

“Stop it. Don't do this!”

“It's not me who did shit,” he says. He smiles sweetly, showing his pointed incisors.

“He had control over me,” I say. “I swear, Hex. You said yourself. It was a spell.”

“None of the rest of us slept with him, though, huh? So he reserved his sex spell just for you?”

“I don't know what he wanted. I don't know why.”

“Although from what Ash says, Ez kind of liked him, too. I guess Horny King wasn't into him, though.” Hex stretches the sleeves of his sweatshirt down over his fingers, exposing his clavicle. He gets up, dusts dirt off the butt of his jeans, and walks away from our camp.

Don't do this.

But, like he said, it isn't Hex who did anything. My mother, she did this to my father. It's not an excuse but maybe it's part of the reason. It's in me, like bad blood, like the ability to kill that I got from Merk.

But maybe this was different. Merk was my parents' best friend and he and my mom consciously betrayed my father. I didn't know the king at all. I was under his spell. He controlled me; I couldn't say no. I wish I could have made it stop. I couldn't make it stop.

Or maybe any kind of “love” is a spell. You can choose to let it own you. Or not.

“Hex!” I cry with what feels like my last breath. Argos sits up on his hind legs as if on alert.

Hex turns around. He pauses.

A young tree grows nearby and he reaches over and snaps off a branch, tosses it at me. The leaves glim-glint in the moonlight like strange gold.

That dainty, jagged smile again. “Go to hell,” Hex says.

I will, I think, as I press my face down into my bed of leaves. I will go straight to hell.

*   *   *

When I open my eyes the little girl is squatting in front of me with her hands on my shoulder. We're in a cave, illuminated only by the glow from her irises, like a cat's.
Tapetum lucidum
is the term for the light-reflecting tissue of the cat's eye, just behind the retina.

I wonder if this is the cave Venice was sitting in front of, the one where Hex found his cigarettes.

“Where's everyone?” I ask.

“Xandra wants me to take you to her.”

I'm relieved to see the girl is all right but I need to know where my friends are.

The girl answers, but only cryptically. “Xandra says if I take you to her she'll set us all free.”

*   *   *

A woman with cropped fair hair is seated in a dark chamber with three huge black dogs surrounding her. Ez, Ash, Venice, and Argos are all there, at her feet. Argos is growling at the dogs as if he thinks he's larger than they are. I don't see Hex.